People: Alan Yarrow - Vice chairman, Dresdner Kleinwort Benson

Yarrow, who has spent his entire career in equities, has effectively been taken over twice, first by Kleinwort Benson in 1986 while at Grieveson Grant, and then in 1995 by Dresdner Bank. He now finds himself head of Dresdner Kleinwort Benson's global equities division, and a member of the main combined bank board.

Yarrow has the calm, cheerful air of a Nato army officer - he refers to his London-based compatriots as "the Brits" and is reputedly excellent at instilling loyalty but himself has a very European outlook. "He's massively concerned and sensitive to people," says one of his colleagues. "That's very rare in the City."

Yarrow's promotion to the DrKB board is also probably reward for what another colleague describes as the "incredibly diplomatic" way he has handled the relationship with Frankfurt.

Yarrow was born in 1951 in Johor Baharu, Malaysia, where his father was running Metal Box in south-east Asia. The family came back to England six years later, and Alan went to Harrow, before working for a year in a graphic art studio in Paris.

He then went to Lancaster University to read economics and French, but didn't last the course. "Nearly all my friends were making a fortune in the City, and I didn't think I was really getting anywhere at Lancaster - the university seemed to be on strike most of the time." So after 14 months, in 1972, Yarrow joined Grieveson Grant, which was then known primarily as a private client and gilt broker. He started "with a telephone and slide rule," on the private client desk of the undeveloped equities side, moving to institutional sales in 1974. He became a member of the Stock Exchange in 1978, and after completing an advanced course in international corporate finance at Manchester Business School, he was made a partner in 1981.

During the early years, Yarrow's pay packet tended to be quite volatile, often amounting to not much. For his honeymoon he was forced to borrow his father-in-law's house in the south of France: his in-laws turned up midway through the week. He jests that one of the great things about his wife, a teacher (to whom he remains very happily married) was her regular income.

Things looked up in 1986, when Grieveson Grant was taken over by Kleinwort Benson, which decided to grow Grieveson's small equities business aggressively, especially research. Execution remained weak, though, and the early years were dominated by a settlement crisis and the fallout of a large position taken in Premier Oil just before the Gulf War, which badly hit Kleinwort's appetite for proprietary trading. "The bank went through an interesting phase of trying to work out whether it wanted to be in the business," remembers Yarrow. "At the same time it was becoming clear that corporate finance actually needed to have a good securities distribution arm."

Yarrow made a success of his jobs as head of UK institutional sales at Kleinwort Grieveson from 1989, and in 1992 became head of global distribution. Two years later as managing director of Kleinwort Benson Securities, he set about trying to build the execution side. And he made the main board of Kleinwort Benson in 1995, three months before the announcement of the takeover by Dresdner.

"I was excited by it to be honest," he recalls. "I felt there wasn't the appetite within Kleinworts to build the equities business on the risk side, and we definitely needed a bigger balance sheet. Dresdner took us over, I believe, for our corporate finance and for our equity distribution. We had at that point a totally integrated equities business employing around 500 with offices in London, Tokyo, south-east Asia, Paris and New York."

Since becoming global head of equities for Dresdner Kleinwort Benson, Yarrow has begun to focus heavily on execution and IT - there had been virtually no investment in technology in the equities business at Kleinwort Benson - recruiting a new head of IT and Xavier Rolet (ex Goldman and CSFB) to build the trading side. "I've always believed that DrKB could become the best securities house in Europe," he says.